Weatherby

Weatherby

= = Socrates  **(469-399 B.C.E.)**  by: Craig Weatherby  student at Cardinal Stritch

overview:

Socrates was the first of the three great Athenian philosophers the other two are Plato and Aristotle. Socrates was born in Athens in 469 BC, so he lived through the time of Pericles and the Athenian Empire, though he was too young to remember Marathon or Salamis. He was not from a rich family. His father was probably a stone-carver, and Socrates also worked in stone, especially as a not-very-good sculptor. Socrates' mother was a midwife. When the Peloponnesian War began, Socrates fought bravely for Athens. We do not have any surviving pictures of Socrates that were made while he was alive, or by anyone who ever saw him, but he is supposed to have been ugly.

But when Socrates was in his forties or so, he began to feel an urge to think about the world around him, and try to answer some difficult questions. He asked, "What is wisdom?" and "What is beauty?" and "What is the right thing to do?" He knew that these questions were hard to answer, and he thought it would be better to have a lot of people discuss the answers together, so that they might come up with more ideas. So he began to go around Athens asking people he met these questions, "What is wisdom?" , "What is piety?", and so forth. Sometimes the people just said they were busy, but sometimes they would try to answer him. Then Socrates would try to teach them to think better by asking them more questions which showed them the problems in their logic. Often this made people angry. Sometimes they even tried to beat him up. This is what is left of the Painted Stoa,or Porch, where Socrates used to teach, in Athens.Socrates soon had a group of young men who listened to him and learned from him how to think. Plato was one of these young men. Socrates never charged them any money. But in 399 BC, some of the Athenians got mad at Socrates for what he was teaching the young men. They charged him in court with impiety (not respecting the gods) and corrupting the youth (teaching young men bad things). People thought he was against democracy, and he probably was - he thought the smartest people should make the decisions for everyone. The Athenians couldn't charge him with being against democracy, because they had promised not to take revenge on anyone after the Peloponnesian War. So they had to use these vague religious charges instead.

Major Works of Socrates
- Although Socrates never wrote anything of his own, we did manage to come to know and understand Socrates’s thoughts and methods through some dialogs recorded mostly by his follower and disciple __[|Plato].__ We can’t exactly be sure that these are all of Socrates’s words. Probably the closest record of Socrates’s actual words was his farewell speech given while he was in court called __The Apology.__

Quotes from Socrates
- "A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong-acting the part of a good man or of a bad." (//from "Apology" by Plato//) - "[The affidavit] says that Socrates is a doer of evil, who corrupts the youth; and who does not believe in the gods of the state, but has other new divinities of his own." (//when he sentenced to death from "Apology" by Plato//) - "Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know." (//from "Apology" by Plato//) - "Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?" (//from "Apology" by Plato//) - "I have a sufficient witness to the truth of what I say-my poverty." (//from "Apology" by Plato//) - "I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live." (//from "Apology" by Plato//) - "If you think that by killing men you can prevent someone from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken. That is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable. The easiest and noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves." (//from "Apology" by Plato//) - "Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet and saying to him after my manner: You, my friend-a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens-are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all!" (//from "Apology" by Plato//) - "Neither in war nor yet at law ought I or any man to use every way of escaping death. ... The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness." (//from "Apology" by Plato//)